Tiffen has long been known to film photographer as the company that made lens filtersglass discs that alter properties of the light entering your camera to produce effects, such as intensifying yellows or reds. With the $2.99 (direct) Photo fx for the iPhone, Tiffen also brings its image expertise to one of the 21st century's most coveted photo-capable devicesthe iPhone. Photo fx offers some stylish effects you can apply to iPhone photos, but it suffers from a number of limitations and a lack of eye-popping fun effects.

Before you start glamming up your pix, you decide what resolution you want them to be: If you're running low on storage, consider dialing down from the full 1,600 by 1,200, which results in files of around 400KB. The only other configuration option is Save Original Photo, which, as you'll see later, can be misleading. To start in with the photo fun, you either choose a picture from your iPhone's camera roll or take one on the spot from within the app.

After selecting an image, an fx page appears. An icon menu at the bottom of the screen lets you switch among the five categories of effects: Face, Outdoor, Fun, Classic, and Wild. The app doesn't do any analysis of the picture, though, to see which is most appropriate. It would be nice if Photo fx offered rudimentary face or horizon detection that could give guidance on whether to process an image in Face or Outdoor, for example.

The effects pretty much consist of blurring images, imposing monochromatic colors, or altering brightness or contrast. Some of effects offer drill-down options, which augment the somewhat limited top-level choices. For example, Looks under Fun fx offers three pages of choices, such as 8mm and sunseta much wider selection of interesting looks than is evident from the top-level choices.

Under the Face selection, the options are Black Pro Mist, Center Spot, Pro-Mist, and SoftFX. Pro-Mist, in particular, does a great job of producing a soft look that's similar to what you'd see in traditional professional portrait photography. But saving a photo with this and other effects took about 20 seconds, so don't expect instant fx.

Choices in the Outdoor category are particularly effective. Polarizer is good at punching up a picture's contrast. Color gradient and Day-for-Night can add interest to an otherwise dull photo. But overall, the app's effects aren't really as much fun as some in other programs, such as Photogene's Heat Map, which produces a psychedelic burst of colors. Nor does the Photo fx pencil-drawing work as well as similar features in Photogene and other software.

Under Classic, you'll find mostly old-timey effects, such as vignettes, black and white, and tints. All the expected color filters for creating monochrome images are there: red, green, blue, yellow, and orange (as well as normal, which gives each color equal weight when transforming to grayscale). These do a decent job at producing the look of photos taken through a glass filter that screens out all but the color you chose. The old-photo simulation, too, offers a good choice of presets, including Cyanotype, Kallitype, Sepia, and Silver Gelatin.

But several aspects of the app's basic operation need improvement. When I left Photo fx and then returned, the app didn't take me directly to the last image I was working on. Worse, closing the app resulted in it saving over the original image with the zany effects I'd applied. This without asking if that's what I wanted, even though I'd chosen Save Original Photo in Settings. This is the very opposite of nondestructive editing, and a serious glitch. Luckily, this problem occurred only with photos taken from Photo fx, not those taken with the basic iPhone camera app.

A floppy-disk icon lets you save your image. When I used this, it did save the doctored photo as a copy, leaving the original untouched. I like the fact that you can save modified pictures at the full 1,600-by-1200 resolution the camera is capable of, which is much preferable to apps that save only to smaller sizes, such as ColorSplash.

I wish, though, that the editor would let you zoom in to view the full-size image on the iPhone itself, especially since you don't see pictures at their full resolution on the iPhone screen. And the program is missing a key tool to assist in applying filters to an imagethe ability to compare the original with the modified image side-by-side, as you can in PhotoLab. I was also disappointed that, within the app, there's no sharing or online component and no printing capability. The program's stability is also a minor concernit stopped responding a couple of times during my testingbut nothing disastrous happened.

Photo fx can apply some elegant filters to iPhone photos, but a number of deficits hold the product back. It has too few really eye-catching effects for making powerful impressions. It lacks interface conveniences of the sort you find in Photogene, and having no integrated way to share your efforts online hampers the software's usefulness. Then too, you get many of the same capabilities in the free Photon app. But if you're looking for some specific filters such as portrait softening, Photo fx may be your only option.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael...

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